SEC Delay Hits Bitcoin By 10% And Wipes Out $10 Billion

A visual representation of the Bitcoin Digital Cryptocurrency. Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would benefit from having more regulation and approval from various governmental agencies as announcements by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, can have an outsized impact on their prices. In early March the SEC released a statement about platforms that trade digital currencies need to register with the SEC. With almost 10,000 exchanges trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that put a chill on their prices and they fell 3% to 13%.

[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]
[Author’s note: There is no official price for Bitcoin, so I use round numbers and reference Yahoo! Finance data.]

Bitcoin fell by over $1,000 to just under $7,000 early last week when a Hong Kong exchange announced that it had frozen a clients account due to the client initiating “an unusually large long position order (4,168,515 contracts).” This was just the latest incident of a cryptocurrency exchange having a problem.

The latest downdraft occurred on Tuesday when the SEC filed an update to a Self Regulator Organization proposed rule delaying VanEck’s request to list and trade SolidX Bitcoin Shares. This comes on the heels of the SEC’s decision on July 26 to not approve the Winklevoss twins application for their Bats BZX Exchange to list and trade shares of the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust. When that application was declined Bitcoin traded down from $8,200 to $7,900.

When the statement about the VanEck application was published on Tuesday it led to Bitcoin falling 10% from $7,100 to $6,300 over the course of a day. The release included that the SEC, “designates September 30, 2018, as the date by which the Commission shall either approve or disapprove, or institute proceedings to determine whether to disapprove, the proposed rule change.” It only took one and a half pages from the SEC to wipe out over $10 billion in market cap .

The chart below shows the decline after these three events occurred.

Bitcoin two week price chartCoinmarketcap.com

Bitcoin chart still in a downward trend

Bitcoin has had a series of lower highs and lower lows. While the cryptocurrency broke a downward trend line starting from its $20,000 high in December (the steep blue line), since February Bitcoin has been in a downward channel as shown by the other two blue lines.